Tag Archives: Knight

A 72-year-old pedestrian was struck in the crosswalk on Cedar Springs Road at Knight Street at about 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 22. He was taken to Parkland Hospital and released on Christmas Day.

Lyle Bainbridge said he was crossing the street in the crosswalk and vehicles had stopped in both directions, when a motorist sped around the stopped vehicles and hit him.

He said he was thrown and his head landed in the gutter just inches from the car that hit him.

The driver of that vehicle stopped and told Bainbridge that he was delivering pizzas and was on his cell phone talking to the owner of his store. Bainbridge said the man was apologetic and in tears when he got out of his car.

Bainbridge has a broken collar bone. Doctors detected heart defibrillation problems that may have been a result of the accident. He said he had not been diagnosed previously with heart problems.

Bainbridge, who is from California, is in Dallas for the holidays house-sitting for a friend.

This is the fourth time a pedestrian has been hit on Cedar Springs Road in two months and the third time near this same location.

Joe Solmonese, Eric Alva, Jessie Tyler Ferguson, Marlee Matlin, Caroline Rhea, Taylor Dayne, Chet Flake and the late Bud Knight are among those who will be honored or will speak at The Black Tie Dinner on Saturday.

Solmonese fears 2012 setback

LAST NIGHT | Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese speaks at a previous Black Tie Dinner in Dallas. Solmonese will be leaving HRC next March, making this weekend’s event the last Black Tie Dinner he will attend as president of the national LGBT advocacy organization.

Outgoing HRC president says community must fight for Obama

But Solmonese says he’s equally concerned about how the LGBT community — and his successor at the Human Rights Campaign — would respond if Obama loses.

Solmonese will step down as president of HRC after seven years in March. On Saturday, Nov. 12, he’ll make his final appearance as the group’s president at the Black Tie Dinner, of which HRC is the national beneficiary.

In an interview last month with Dallas Voice, Solmonese focused largely on the importance of 2012 elections, saying that depending on their outcome, major advances during his tenure could be all but erased.

“I don’t think that he’s going to lose,” Solmonese said at one point, attempting to clarify his assessment of Obama’s chances. “I think that if everybody does what they need to do, I think there is just as good a chance that Barack Obama will be re-elected, but I’m as concerned that he could lose.”

Solmonese said Republicans already have a majority in the House, Democrats have only a slim majority in the Senate, and “everything about these [2012] elections points to us having real challenges.”

“I think that if everybody who has gained from the Obama administration does everything they need to do over the course of the next year, he’ll get re-elected,” Solmonese said. “But I would be lying if I said I’m not very concerned about the prospects of him getting re-elected.”

Solmonese said the message he wants to send to the LGBT community is that Obama has done more for us than any other president, and that the movement has seen more gains under the current administration than at any other time in its history.

“If we care about continuing with the forward motion that we’ve experienced, then we as a community need to do everything possible to re-elect Barack Obama,” Solmonese said. “And we can talk about and debate and press the administration on his ability to do more, and him coming out for marriage, or anything else that we want to talk about, but now is the time to sort of decouple that from all of the work we need to put into getting him re-elected. Because at the end of the day, it comes down to a choice, and the choice isn’t even hard for me: It’s Barack Obama or any of these other people who are running against him.”

Despite his concerns about Obama’s chances, Solmonese said he has no misgivings about leaving HRC seven months prior to Election Day. He said he made a commitment to give the organization six months notice, and his contract expires in March.

He said announcing his resignation at the end of August allowed HRC to begin the transition process, which will be completed when his successor takes over, midway through the Republican primary. Solmonese also said he’ll continue to be involved with the organization through next year, assisting with its efforts around the November election.

“I’m a lot more concerned about what happens the morning after the elections,” Solmonese said. “I’m a lot more concerned about this organization and its leader being in the best possible position to navigate those waters, and either we are contemplating a second term with Obama and a continuation of our agenda and perhaps a decidedly different Congress, or we’re contemplating President Mitt Romney and all of the implications that means for our community, and I want whoever is in this seat leading this organization contemplating where we go from there, to have had some time under their belt to figure that out.”

Asked whether that means he believes Romney will be the Republican nominee, Solmonese clarified that anyone claims to know definitively “doesn’t’ know what they’re talking about” — but he added that he thinks the former Massachusetts governor is the “odds-on favorite.”

And while Romney may appear less anti-gay than some other GOP presidential hopefuls, Solmonese said called him “someone you have to be careful of” because “he’s essentially beholden to no issue.”

“He adopts a position that works best for the political predicament he finds himself in,” said Solmonese, a Massachusetts native who’s watched Romney’s political career closely. “So, while he was seemingly pro-gay as he attempted to unseat Ted Kennedy, and his rhetoric isn’t harsh and he doesn’t have the same sort of narrative that a Rick Santorum has, he’s effectively said that he doesn’t believe in the repeal of ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ and that he would support the federal marriage amendment. But what we don’t know, just like we didn’t really anticipate with [President] George [W.] Bush, is how beholden he is going to feel to the hard right once he becomes president.”

It was Bush, of course, whose administration was pushing a federal marriage amendment when Solmonese joined HRC in 2005.

The marriage amendment, Solmonese said, represents the worst possible thing that could happen to the LGBT community, because it would enshrine discrimination into the Constitution.

And although the threat of the amendment may seem like a distant memory to some, Solmonese warned that it could easily resurface. Which is why, he said, the 2012 elections are the biggest challenge HRC faces going forward.

“I think the elections loom largest because what the elections really represent to me is the potential for us to really stop, potential derail and ultimately set back a lot of the progress that we’ve made,” Solmonese said. “What also concerns me then is that the community be braced for that, and we understand that we’ve been in these places before, and the measure of who we are and how we’ll be defined, is how we react in those moments, the degree to which we stay in the fight and make sure we continue to press forward regardless of the outcome of the election.”

Solmonese said he fears the progress of the last several years may lead to complacency. And he said based on his experience, when the LGBT community suffers setbacks, instead of regrouping and uniting, people have a tendency to lose their way and point fingers.

“If we lose, if the outcome is negative, if we go from the march toward marriage equality and the repeal of DOMA and the positive direction that we’ve been in, to a president and a Congress who decide they’re so troubled by all the success we’re having with marriage they want to take up the fight again to pass the federal marriage amendment — well, boy, we’ve come full circle from where we were back in 2005, the last time that happened,” he said.

“And you can react to that in one of two ways. You can say this is the inevitable ebb and flow of social change, so pull up your boot straps and let’s get going and turn that around again — and understand that that sort of energy that the other side has around something like that is a reaction to their own fear of the progress we’ve made — or you can become very dispirited and depressed and disenfranchised and decide that it’s our own doing, it’s our own lack of progress, it’s our own failing. And that would be the worst possible thing that we could do.”

Caroline Rhea: From the hip

Caroline Rhea

From her role as Noleta Nethercott on Del Shores’ campy queer Texas-based sitcom Sordid Lives to taking over Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show, Caroline Rhea has long has a strong connection to the gay community. This week, she breaks new ground again, becoming the first professional comedienne to serve as soup-to-nuts emcee for the Black Tie Dinner.
Rhea took a moment this week to discuss her involvement with the LGBT community, her Texas ties and her new (like her, Canadian) reality TV show.

Dallas Voice:You’ve always seemed to be close to the LGBT community. Where does that stem from? Rhea: I am not a direct member of the LGBT community, but I have had a BLT. In the Venn diagram of life, there is a lot of crossover between gay men and female comedians. It’s a mutual lovefest.

How different is it to do a gay event like Black Tie vs. a comedy show on the road? The audience is much better looking.

For special events like this, do you bring your family? Not if it involves bringing a toddler on a plane.

What in you is fulfilled to do an event such as Black Tie Dinner? I want to support the LGBT community in all that they do.

If you were to rank all you do — acting, hosting, voiceovers, comedy, etc. — how do you rank your priorities? Motherhood first. Then comedy, and working with people that I like.

You have hosted a new reality competition series in your native Canada, Cake Walk: Wedding Cake Edition. How did you enjoy that? Did you get to taste the goods? Believe it or not, I didn’t taste the cakes.

Will there be a same-sex couple on the show? I hope so.

How do you think that would fly with the show’s audience? Same-sex marriage has been legal for years in Canada. It would be another beautiful wedding.

Having now worked with Del Shores on the Logo series Sordid Lives, how do you perceive Texas in general? Dallas in particular? Any misconceptions you had that were proven wrong? My dad’s family was from Texas and my father looked like J.R. Ewing. I am not a fan of your toll roads and every time I am on the George Bush Turnpike I feel like I am going backwards.

—Arnold Wayne Jones

Taylor Dayne can’t stop the music

More than 20 years after she packed the gay bar dance floors with her debut hits, the songstress is still going strong, and says her performance at Black Tie is a ‘win-win’ for her and her fans

She can’t quite recall when she knew she was a hit with the gay community: Over the course of her 23-year career in pop music, she’s played venues of all sizes, but she did notice early on how a certain fan base seemed to keep showing up.

“It’s kinda hard to remember, but I would perform very specific shows and then some gay clubs and it dawned on me,” she said.

With an explosive debut, thanks to her platinum selling 1988 debut Tell It To My Heart and the more sophisticated follow-up Can’t Fight Fate a year later, Dayne became a quick force to be reckoned with on the charts.

But her pop hits were just as big on the dance floor, and Dayne was resonating across the queer landscape.

“I’ve had wonderful relationship with gay and lesbian fans for years. I’m so glad to be doing Black Tie because I have a great core of fan base here,” she said. “It’ll be a good show with lots of fun and for a good cause. It’s a win-win.”

Dayne’s performed at gay bars and Pride events in Boston, Chicago and the Delaware Pride Festival. But appreciation of her work in the community was clearly evident in 2010 when she was asked to record “Facing a Miracle” as the anthem for the Gay Games.

“That was quite an honor and then they asked me to perform at the games,” she said. “It was very emotional for me. The roar of the crowd was great.”

Even after two decades, Dayne remains just as committed to music as she was in 1988. She’s embraces her sort of “elder” status in pop music and instead of seeing the likes of Nikki Minaj and Katy Perry as rivals, she enjoys what they are bringing to the landscape of music now.

“I love listening to all the new stuff going on. There is some great talent out there. It’s nice to know I was some inspiration to them, the way ladies like Debbie Harry and Pat Benatar were for me. The cycle goes on,” Dayne said.

But they still push her to keep in the game. She admitted, “I’m pretty competitive that way.”

This year, Dayne released the single, “Floor on Fire,” which made it to the Billboard Dance/Club Charts Top 10.

At 49, Dayne doesn’t show signs of slowing. Along with a rumored second greatest hits album, she recently wrapped up filming the indie movie Telling of the Shoes and she’s a single mother to 9-year-old twins. Juggling it all is a mix of emotions, but her confidence pushes her through.

“I can say I’m a great singer, so when it comes to decisions, I’m fine about recording and performing,” she said. “But I would say I work really hard at acting. It’s nerve-wracking but it’s also amazing. But I’m not a novice at any of this.”

With her children, she doesn’t make any pretenses about the difficulty of being both a musician and a mom — as long as she instills the proper principles in them.

“We don’t try to get wrapped up in small time crap,” she said. “At the end of day it’s about having a good heart and they have great heart.”

It’s likely she’ll show the same at Black Tie.

……………………

BLACK TIE DETAILS

The 30th annual DFW Black Tie Dinner will be held Saturday night, Nov. 12, at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel. The event is already sold out.

Chet Flake and his late partner, Bud Knight, will be honored as recipients of the Raymond Kuchling Humanitarian Award, and gay military veteran Eric Alva, the first U.S. serviceman injured in the Iraq war and an advocate for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” will received the Elizabeth Birch Equality Award.

Dinner organizers this year decided, for the first time, to bring in an emcee for the evening, choosing popular comedian Caroline Rhea.

This year also marks the final time that Joe Solmonese will attend the dinner as president of the Human Rights Campaign, the national beneficiary of Black Tie, which each year receives about half the proceeds of the event. Solmonese has resigned as head of HRC, effective next March.

Seventeen local HIV/AIDS and LGBT organizations have also been designated as beneficiaries.

Black Tie Dinner includes a silent auction, a live luxury auction and an after-party at the hotel.

Robert Knight will once again tell us who we are, what we want, and why we do what we do:

“Like other terms that swiftly achieve common usage, “sexual orientation” is rarely examined. Yet “sexual orientation” is more than a neutral term that can be used to describe anyone’s sexual inclinations. It is a radical challenge to the beliefs of all major religious faiths because it attacks the notion that sexual behavior has moral dimensions. It especially challenges Christianity.

The underlying concept of “sexual orientation” is that all sexual behavior is equally valid and equally valuable to society. There are no good choices or bad choices, just desires. “Sexual orientation” laws are the legal embodiment of the old ’60s slogan, “If it feels good, do it.” However, the orthodox Christian view is that people who embrace sinful behavior as an identity are to be challenged like any other sinner, and they should be assisted in resisting temptation and overcoming it. They are to be encouraged to repent and avail themselves of the healing power of Jesus Christ. “Empowering” a particular sin serves only to trap sinners and encourages them to continue practicing their sinful behavior. That is why “supporting “gay rights” based on the relativist notion of “sexual orientation” is the opposite of Christian compassion, however well meant.

Over the past 90 years, a steady campaign has unfolded to overthrow Christian morality and replace it with an amorality that says desires in and of themselves validate behavior. It has been advanced largely by hijacking the rubric and moral capital of the black civil rights movement and attempting to apply such rhetoric to gain support for same-sex behavior. The political Left has long been at war against sexual morals for strategic reasons.“

Uhm, Mr. Knight: “Sexual orientation” is not a mere term. It’s not political rhetoric. Sexual orientation is science. Is research. Is truth about the human condition’s full spectrum.

Sexual orientation isn’t an “If it feels good, do it” notion. Instead, it is an “If it *is* you, live it” reality. So it’s one thing to choose religious beliefs that both see and bring problems to certain people on the basis of their relational cores (a.k.a. sexual orientations). But these anti-[certain citizens] theological convictions must deal with the world as it actually exists, not vice versa. And of course civil government must deal with this actuality free from church interference.

Does supporting rights based on scientifically-recognized sexual orientation free from some people’s personal faith (and in ways that fully match pro-gay people’s faith beliefs) constitute an attempt “to overthrow Christian morality and replace it with an amorality that says desires in and of themselves validate behavior“? Of course not! The truth is that folks like Robert Knight have, for decades, been using their own cherry-picked sense of what is and is not kosher under Christian moral code (incidentally: non-kosher food is totally fine) to replace America’s actual range of citizenship with only a limited span, all of whom agree to sidle whole hog onto the religious right’s own myopic vision. The anti-LGBT throngs’ constant message: That everyone else must deny their own feelings, beliefs, and learned interpretations of constitutional law, so as to allow “pro-family” values an unfettered reign. Which for LGBT people always boils down to either living a fake life or losing fair and equal citizenship. Which for both LGBT people and allies means a denial of their own morality (or even the possibility that such people could have moral compasses).

So who’s really been on the strategic path in this country? Is it (1) those who’ve fostered better understanding of the world’s diverse people and connected dots about how and why all humans can and should coexist civilly and peacefully; or (2) the crowd that’s undertaken a complex, highly financed, extremely (even admirably) tactical, decidedly code word-laden “culture war” against supposed undesirables? Because from where we sit, we see one side that would give anything to stop fighting and simply live, and another, highly-motivated crew that refuses to let that easy reality come to pass. We see a war that we never wanted or declared, but are now conscience-bound to fight.

For some, the need to stigmatize the lgbt community based on their constant desire to remind folks about gay sex never goes away.

Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries has made a career out of spreading anti-gay propaganda and lies, even to the point of citing the discredited Paul Cameron in front of Congress. And in a recent piece in The Washington Times – one of the only places that will publish his nonsense – Knight is claiming that Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed because Republicans refused to get nasty about homosexuality:

Instead of using the military debate to bring to light many suppressed facts that could cripple the homosexual juggernaut if Americans only knew, they played by their opponents' rule book.

In “After the Ball,” a 1989 gay-strategy manual, two Harvard-trained public relations experts warn that “the public should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex per se should be downplayed, and the issue of gay rights reduced, as far as possible, to an abstract social question.” Elsewhere, the authors say, “first, you get your foot in the door by being as similar as possible; then and only then … can you start dragging in your other peculiarities, one by one. You hammer in the wedge narrow end first … allow the camel's nose beneath your tent, and his whole body will soon follow.”

For the record, the majority of lgbts never heard of After the Ball, but for some reason, the religious right continues to claim that the lgbt community is using this book as some sort of manual to take over America by utilizing tactics, i.e. planning groups, money, secret organizations, that the religious right themselves are guilty of.

Knight then proceeds to catalog a bunch of things he feels Republicans should have brought up:

* Flawed science has been misused mightily. From Alfred Kinsey's fraudulent research in the 1940s to UCLA Prof. Evelyn Hooker's cooked psychological studies in the late 1950s to misreported “genetic” studies of the 1990s, the public has been browbeaten into ignoring biology, common sense and thousands of years of moral teaching about human sexuality.

* The obvious threat to the military blood supply. According to the Centers for Disease Control, men who have sex with men are 44 times more likely to have HIV and 46 more times to have syphilis. Even if gay men enter the services testing negatively, they're going to have sex in the most likely pool in which to become infected.

* Data compiled by the Family Research Council showing that homosexuals commit a disproportionate number of sexual assaults in the military, even with the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy.

Notice how he never says just how the studies of Kinsey and Hooker were flawed, how he gives himself an out in talking about the blood supply by the “even if” addendum, and how he cites the Family Research Council's useless study, which no one else cited. Knight conveniently forgot to mention the “coincidence” of the discredited Paul Cameron coming out with the same type of study a week before FRC did.

The irony of Knight's position is the realization that 17 years ago, Republicans and those who didn't support gays and lesbians serving openly in the military did pull out the horror stories. They talked about “gay sex,” “the gay agenda,” “fisting,” and even pulled the “gay assault” card.

But things have changed. Homophobia still exists but for the most part, more of us are out and unashamed of who we are despite the efforts of those like Knight. Americans know more of us and the lies about us being an invading horde of Godless creatures just isn't resonating like they used to.

The sad thing is that no one told Knight.But I don't think he would care if anyone did tell him. He seems to be willfully stuck in the past.

When it comes to politics, Christians must pick their spiritual battles. And today, longtime foe of the ‘mos Robert Knight is choosing to fight President Obama on this contention that everyone is a child of God:

On October 14, Obama said people are born with a certain makeup, claiming all are “children of God.” Furthermore, he said, people do not make choices about who they love.

“That’s a mangling of scripture [which] says not everybody is a child of God,” Knight responds. “We’re all created in God’s image, but to be a child of God means to come under God’s authority and to honor God above all else and to submit to Jesus Christ.”

So what happens if/when we win marriage equality at the United States Supreme Court? Well, if longtime “pro-family” so-and-so Robert Knight has his way, we will see evangelical Christians denying the decision ever happened:

It goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, flanked by leftist newcomers Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, Anthony Kennedy takes his latest plunge into existential mystery and manufactures a constitutional “right” to force Americans to recognize same-sex “marriage.” I’m not saying they are going to do this, but what if?

What should right-thinking Americans do?

First, they should announce loudly and clearly that they won’t go along with this abuse of language ruse. Does a federal judge have the right to change the meaning of a word?

For example, if a law gave special recognition to dogs (a dog license) could Judge Walker, a cat lover, arbitrarily decree that cats are dogs? Clearly not, any more than decreeing the absurdity of brideless or groomless “marriage” into the law immediately transforms it into the real thing. Creating counterfeits and then forcing them down people’s throats is straight out of George Orwell’s Newspeak in 1984.

Gay activists aren’t trying to change the species of marriage participants in ways that incorrectly mislabels — the goal is simply for society to accommodate all worthy and eligible members of the human race. Gay couples exist in loving unions. Gay couples share responsibilities with each other and share taxes with their government. To honor these unions with marriage is not at all like inaccurately labeling an Abyssinian as a Shih Tzu: It’s more like allowing all doggies access to the same kennel, regardless of whose leg they might hump.

</absurd realm where gay humans are forced to defend themselves against biological declassification>

Knight goes on to compare potential marriage equality to the Alien and Sedition Acts, saying that it would “impose falsehoods on its citizens” and stifle the First Amendment in a way that “Americans are wired to resist.” Except gay Americans, of course. We just want to play fetch the constitution before lining our litter boxes with the same.